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Feeling Disconnected

I’ve begun to feel especially disconnected from my past actions. I can “review” them as if the choices and events happened to someone else outside myself. I often felt this way as a teenager, especially during 7th grade at Coweeman Junior High School. I could return home at the end of each school day and replay that day in my head like a movie I watched happening to someone else. I believe isolation was a big part of this. My parents were overprotective due to my early health issues and my best friend had moved away that summer when her parents divorced. While this decreased as I made the adjustment between grade school and junior (middle) school and pushed myself to participate more, it periodically catches up with me.

This disconnect typically occurs in three sets of circumstances:

One: I am doing something I deeply resent in a place I probably don’t want to be.
Two: I have chosen to do something that makes me uncomfortable to achieve a desired outcome.
Three: I am too polite to break some social norm being used by another person for manipulation or control.

The immediate experience has decreased in adulthood. I don’t feel disconnected from the things that I did today and go home to review them before bed. I feed disconnected when trying to recall the motivation and choices I made months or years ago. Daily life is just muted. That’s probably why I don’t get the sharp separation, but also don’t experience immediacy or necessity much. I can still feel outraged, but I don’t believe much will change.

I totally get the series HOUSE and especially the episode about the guy who was taking drugs to drop his own IQ in hopes of living a “normal” life with a pretty girl and simpler aspirations. I totally get that life is simpler for less intellectual people. They live NOW in the tension of doing what’s expected and what feels good. Brief periods in my life where I am moderately successful living NOW occur when I keep myself too busy and too tired to do anything else.

Goodreads – Currently Reading

Goodreads – Recently Finished

Just Thinking …

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” ― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” – Simone de Beauvoir

“Naive as it may sound, inoculating society against the antisocial requires, at bottom, persuading people of what is palpably true: that society has value and everyone should contribute.” – Bruce Cannon Gibney, Author